University of Minnesota - UMN Executive Leadership Insights
The Emotionally Intelligent Manager
Book

The Emotionally Intelligent Manager

How to Develop and Use the Four Key Emotional Skills of Leadership

David R. Caruso and Peter Salovey
Jossey-Bass, 2004
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Editorial Rating

9

Qualities

  • Innovative
  • Applicable

Recommendation

It’s rare for a business book to offer first-hand, practical advice from a thinker who has revolutionized academic thought in his field. Here, that thinker is co-author Peter Salovey, the pioneer who invented the concept of emotional intelligence. Salovey provides a practical, application-oriented guide. With co-author David R. Caruso, he shows you how to take the idea of emotional intelligence - that emotional well-being and wholeness are at least as essential as intellectual capacity - and use it to do something truly relevant: create emotionally intelligent managers. The authors thoughtfully steer away from the superficial, self-help genre pitfall that purports to offer an easy one-book panacea. Instead, they offer a series of case studies and interactive exercises that may help even the most hard-hearted executive become less emotionally challenged. getAbstract gives this book its highest recommendation; it’s a gift to those toiling in the emotionally barren modern workplace.

Summary

Emotions at Work

The common view of emotions in the workplace is negative. "Don’t get so worked up," people will advise you. Or they may say, "You need to keep a cool head" or even, "Let’s not let our emotions carry us away here. We need to think rationally."

All of this is bad advice. These statements actually reflect a common, misguided notion of what emotions really are. It’s the idea that emotions are remnants from millions of years of evolution, and that a more "perfect" person would necessarily be more rational and, thus, less emotional. Emotions, then, are about as useful as your appendix, and to the extent they can be removed from your behavior, you’re likely to be better off without them.

The problem with this view is that it is patently, scientifically false. In fact, work conducted by University of Iowa neuroscientist Antonio Damasio shows that emotions are integral to the human thought process, rather than a secondary legacy. Indeed, as human brains have grown more complex through millions of years of evolution, the wiring for emotion remains. Emotion cannot be surgically removed from intelligence. The time has come for managers, instead, to say things...

About the Authors

Peter Salovey, dean of Yale University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, is the Chris Argyris Professor of Psychology at Yale and president of the Society for General Psychology. A leading authority on the psychological consequences of emotion, he was founding editor of the Review of General Psychology. David R. Caruso is a management psychologist and research affiliate in the Department of Psychology at Yale. He is a consultant and seminar leader who specializes in executive coaching, career assessment and leadership development.

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